Executive pay has rarely been out of the headlines in the last few years. Simon Laffin considers the dilemma facing those who control it and why some of the potential solutions may not be as clear as they seem.

Now I’m going to take a wild guess here, that the least favourite part of a typical non-executive role is setting executive remuneration.

To the media, and now even the government, it appears that non-exective directors (NEDs) love nothing more than awarding large pay increases, bonuses and pay-offs to executives. It often seems that investors share this perception, and believe that it is only institutional shareholder intervention that can restrain the irrational generosity of the average non-exec.

Meanwhile, executives are usually demanding higher remuneration and showing the remuneration committee comparisons that reveal how underpaid they are.

There is no right answer as to how much to pay someone. The only ‘objective’ measure is to pay what you perceive is the ‘market rate’ for the role, or some fixed relationship to it (eg upper quartile or 10% above/below).

This is the first stop of the remuneration consultants, who advise NED’s. However, market rate setting causes inbuilt inflation. Many companies want to pay above the average, but few want to pay below average. The rest is mathematics.

Remuneration consultants will tell you that FTSE 250 benchmark is 150% of salary in annual bonus, and it’s difficult to argue down from that. Long-term bonuses are now generally signed off any way by large shareholders from the start.

Of course not all remuneration committees do a good job and some make bad judgements. Personally I agree that much executive pay, like that of a few other occupations, is too high, especially long-term incentives.

Tackling the problem

The question is what to do about it. The latest proposal from a Conservative MP last week, and apparently backed by leading fund manager, Neil Woodford, is that large companies should form a committee of their five largest shareholders, with a worker representative and the company chairman invited as observers. This committee would approve pay deals, recommend appointment and removal of directors and question strategy.

Most non-execs would be only too delighted to delegate remuneration to someone else. The problem is that remuneration decisions are closely linked in to the detail of a company’s operation, career development or recruitment and retention. This means that the decisions need to be taken with full knowledge of a number of complex and potentially price-sensitive issues.

Many larger fund managers currently delegate governance issues to a specialist corporate governance department. However, these individuals inevitably lack the knowledge of the company and sector that the fund manager has. To have any chance of this working, institutional shareholders would have to send the fund managers, not corporate governance specialists, to these committees. My suspicion is that this would not be a welcome extra task for fund managers. Mr Woodford is already a busy man.

Institutional shareholders can already nominate, vote directors in and out. Do they really want to become the nomination committee, even without seeing how directors perform in board meetings?

Why would it take a committee of five large shareholders to challenge company strategy? In my experience most shareholder meetings talk strategy and there is plenty of opportunity for shareholders to express their views.

There are many smaller shareholders who would be worried about how this proposal would increase the power of a few large holders. Recent rule changes have strengthened protection for smaller shareholders from single dominant shareholders. Protection of minority shareholder’s interests is a key role for directors, which could be undermined by strengthening the power of the top five over director selection.

High-flying balancing act

There isn’t an easy solution to setting executive pay. Remuneration has become a leviathan, taking up absurd amounts of board time, as directors try to balance executive aspirations with many different shareholder demands and compliance requirements.

I would welcome clearer guidelines from institutions as a whole on how they would like remuneration to be set. They would of course need to agree those guidelines among themselves first. Fund managers could engage more with non-exec directors, both to evaluate them and to communicate their wishes, and then to vote at AGMs for non-execs they trust.

If there were clear unitary guidelines, investors could vote out directors who don’t follow these rules. Shareholders don’t need to, don’t want to, and can’t, manage companies that they invest in. They should set the rules, and then judge the directors who do manage their companies.

This would build on our existing strong corporate governance framework, rather than bowing to media and political pressure by creating new parallel structures.

Written by Flybe chairman Simon Laffin. Simon Laffin’s views are his own and not those of the company.